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How's it going now, Star Citizen? Another record breaking revenue year so far; that means lots of progress in making the game, right? RIGHT?
(www.youtube.com)
Oh who am I kidding; I'm still this face right now
Freelancer was only in development for six years too (with Roberts for ~4 years)
At this point I think the only option would be to bin everything and start over
Star Citizen could have been a decent game if it didn't feature creep itself year after year after, and had some compromises like instanced landing zones and none of that bedsheet wrinkling simulation shit.
It was still masturbatory space Roman fascism with 90s shopping mall characteristics as a setting, unless that was thrown out too (yes please).
Locking themselves into CryEngine was a particularly bazinga poison pill for the game
Like if they were absolutely dead set on an FPS engine, surely you'd try to licence something like PlanetSide 2's engine
The price a cult of personality pays is that whatever the cult of personality leader says is the cult's law.
Chris Roberts thought CryEngine looked epic. The "code whisperer" didn't know its limitations and didn't care. He told his underlings to make it work.
Oof, I'd probably rather rebuild from an already existing engine (not CryEngine), which star citizen definitely had the money to do before it apparently just snorted it all. Elite Dangerous went backwards from starting with space shenanigans and gradually programming back to infantry scale stuff.